Look at gold this way in the PP. Its a hedge against really, REALLY bad things happening. That's why its so important to hold it in the physical sense. Its the only asset that has no counter-party liability. Ie if things completely blow up, its the currency of last resort. There has never, EVER been...

Couple interesting things: Swiss 10 Franc: About 4 years ago the Swiss central bank released hoards of them. Well, either they did or a massive customer at UBS did. No one really knows. Anyways, they were a rare coin up to that point. You can now pick them up for less than 5% over melt :) For the PP...

I import and export large quantities of gold daily as a bonded importer/exporter and marketmaker. Let me inform you of the current law (which could change). First forget the $10,000 cash limit. It has nothing to do with the eagles. The intrinsic value is much higher which is all that customs cares a...

I'm in the same boat-ish. I own my home free and clear and have often thought of financing it with the extremely low current rates... Until my late father's voice starts screaming at me that I'm a moron. His point would have been that with 3 kids, I'd be a fool to give up a completely risk free scen...

Logic says miners have more bang for the buck. Heck GDX looks cheap and GDXJ is yielding.. what something over 8% (Not at my trade desk.. at home for the weekend). the problem is that when gold becomes the most desirable, and the miners looks to gain the most, the least stable countries look to nati...

I'd shift my 401k and IRA to hold stocks, bonds, cash. I'd try and hold as much physical outside of them as I could. I'd own the ETF as long as I was working on reducing the ETF into physical on an ongoing basis. I guess I'm saying the current risk of ETF default is low. But that could change at a m...

I've been through the Refco, and the Man Financial debacles on the futures side. Nothing like seeing the president of the company before a congressional hearing saying hes not responsible/doesn't know what happened when you know DAMN WELL that he stole cash out of your segregated account. Its infuri...

So I'll answer each piece part by part. Lets say you have an unlimited amount of buying power (not cash, just buying power... and I know its impossible, just stick with me). Lets say you want to put that buying power to work. You look for a market that is fairly non liquid at a certain time. That me...

Correction. 20,000 contracts were dumped in under a second.

90% of the regulators for futures are on furlough. What you say today is blatant algo trading to manipulate the market. The process happened in about 200 ms, and shut down CME for 10 seconds. No sane person dumps 2 million ounces on the market at once unless its for manipulation purposes. Shorts wer...

It depends on what you ordered. If its something common like american Gold Eagles *and* there is no current holdup to tier one distributors, Tier ones will get their shipments once a week. That means gold mart will get their shipment from the tier ones every week. If its taking more than 2 weeks for...

American Gold Exchange stocks them I know. They are a reputable dealer. Not sure if you can buy them one at a time on their site, might have to call them.

Gold is definitely becoming more scarce.  Each oz costs more to mine (ore grades are typically much worse than 50 years ago) and more people in the world wanting gold. Silver has an even better story. This is a bit of a misnomer. There are really 2 parts to this. 1) Gold has been more expensive to ...

The problem with figuring out the real return for gold is two fold: 1) It has to be compared to something... a benchmark. WHAT benchmark? It could be argued the gold itself is the "golden" benchmark and everything else should be compared to it. If we look at it this way, gold has no real r...

Zerohedge can be a claptrap.... JPM doesn't have to buy up physical. They can simply not deliver and deliver cash instead (force majure). What is significant though is that that don't have any physical. Scotia and HSBC have plenty of physical, but its not necessarily stored in the U.S. nor are they ...

Gold surging today on lack of supply in Dubai and India banning gold imports into the country. Tell someone they can't have something and you almost guarantee that the demand is going to surge.

Meanwhile JPM's physical gold vault continues to empty....

If anyone cares, we are seeing strong price movement on massive short covering over the last few days. Largest number covers in this timeframe in the last decade. All the industrials (miners ect) have very low short exposure. The existing shorts are from the speculators. They seem to be covering ha...

There are 3 main groups of people that short in the gold market. Gold producers (industry), small specs, and large specs. Small specs are just that, pretty small. As a total they don't mean much. Large specs (speculators) are banks ,hedge funds, you name it. If you look at the long term movement of ...

If anyone cares, we are seeing strong price movement on massive short covering over the last few days. Largest number covers in this timeframe in the last decade. All the industrials (miners ect) have very low short exposure. The existing shorts are from the speculators. They seem to be covering har...

Any gold that's close to melt is PP eligible. Doesn't much matter where it comes from, as long as it comes from a reputable dealer. Gold is gold. PP mandates cheap gold. That's about it

I've lurked for years. Just decided to start posting because I see some inaccurate info sometimes. I've started referring people to crawling road and the forums for the PP so I'll try to clear up as much murkiness as I'm able to. I think the reason gold generates so many questions is because its bee...

They are if you can get em cheap.... and considering they are ugly as all get out you should be able to

There is actually a few interesting stories about the counterfeit sovs. First off during the first half of the 20th century the Bank of England did a very good job removing the counterfeits from circulation. You find very few of them now a days. The ones you do find are very crude. they look mushy, ...

If you look around, you can find good deals. You just have to be patient. I'll list a few things that dealers HATE and you should be able to buy cheap: Post office arts medals. The U.S. in its infinite wisdom made medals (not coins) and sold them through the post office. they were .900 fine. They ca...

Re-Read.. Pound = Sovereign =  Sov Sorry for the slang